A fat tree architecture is an important deployment scheme of a data center (DC) network. A typical network topology of the fat tree architecture includes switches of an access layer, switches of a convergence layer and servers. Each switch of the access layer is interconnected with each switch of the convergence layer.
Taking a medium-sized fat tree architecture as an example, the architecture has 3000 to 5000 servers. When a server needs to access another server in the architecture, an ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) request sent by a VM (Virtual Machine,) in the server is broadcast to all the other servers and switches in the architecture. Therefore, if a lot of VMs send ARP requests, an ARP request flooding may occur, thereby consuming network bandwidth, and occupying CPU resources of the switches in the convergence layer and servers. Therefore, how to solve an ARP request flooding problem is a key of the fat tree architecture.
In the prior art, the ARP request flooding problem may be solved through an ARP proxy server. However, when the ARP proxy server dynamically acquires an IP address from a DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) server, after obtaining the ARP request sent by the VM, the ARP proxy server needs to communicate with the DHCP server frequently so as to obtain the IP address of an accessed server, and therefore, the ARP proxy server fails to respond to the ARP request in time, resulting in poor real-time performance.